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Technologies are not just neutral tools to be applied (or misapplied) by their users. They are artefacts built by people.
tools are made in the image of the humans who design them.
The first web-based social network in the world was SixDegrees.
amassing its first million users in just 15 months.
it took a mere six months for Lime to serve 1 million rides; and only another seven months to get to 10 million.
In quantum computing, that elementary unit is the qubit – and qubits reflect the underlying maths of quantum physics. Unlike the binary nature of bits, which must either be a 0 or a 1, a qubit can represent all values between 0 and 1 simultaneously.
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing
3D printing market grew 11 times in the decade to 2019 – a rate of 27 per cent per annum.
Throughout history, general purpose technologies (GPTs) have transformed society beyond recognition.
First comes the installation phase, when the basic infrastructure underpinning a GPT is developed. The roll-out of a GPT is an arduous process: to build an electricity network, you need to build generating systems and power lines and grids. In this phase, skills are limited, and know-how is scarce.
But the real revolution comes at the next stage: the deployment phase.
His theory was that for every doubling in units produced, costs would fall by a constant percentage. The
the key to the continuation of Wright’s Law is increasing volume. Greater demand drives improvements in the process, which in turn drive down costs, which in turn drives further demand, and so on.
As they put what they have learnt into practice, costs get driven down further and further.
The generating capacity of a wind turbine is proportional to the area that the blades sweep through. That area grows by the square of the length of the blades, so if you are able to manufacture a blade twice as long, you get quadruple the impact.
By 2020, General Electric was delivering wind turbines with 24 times that output and a diameter of 220 metres – 5.5 times longer than the 1990 vintage.30 But the greater cause of the newfound power of Wright’s Law lies in economics.
The second driver of exponentiality is even simpler: combination.
Exponential technologies are being driven by three mutually reinforcing factors – the power of learning by doing, the increasing interaction and combination of new technologies, and the emergence of new networks of information and trade.
Friedman’s famous doctrine, which held that the social responsibility of corporations and the business sector was to increase profits, and not much else.
From the late 1970s onwards, free-market capitalism would unleash the power of exponentiality.
Between 2014 and 2015, the global average cost for solar photovoltaic energy dropped below that of coal.
Over the course of the next decade, the firm increased its annual R&D budget by about 44 per cent every year. As
In 2019, Elon Musk envisioned that Tesla, the car firm, would have a fleet of 1 million self-driving taxis, what he called ‘robo-taxis’, on the roads by the end of 2020.
Now they were spending that time playing with their phones. So gum sales plummeted.
In the 1760s, before the industrial revolution really took off, the average British worker toiled for 41.5 hours a week. By 1830, this had risen to 53.6 hours – an extra hour and a half each day of week. By the 1870s, when the Victorian economy had largely completed its transition from agriculture to industry, the typical worker was nudging 57 hours
By 1870, the average American was sweating out 62 hours a week; the typical Australian only six hours less.
gap – between the speed of technological and social change and the speed of institutional and political adaptation.
All these institutions have something in common. They are largely not cut out to develop at an exponential pace or in the face of rapid societal change. In the most extreme cases, they’re not cut out to adapt at all.
Steve Ballmer, the then CEO of Microsoft, dismissed Apple’s new gadget, saying: ‘It has no chance of gaining significant market share.’
diminishing marginal returns – that is, a decreasing return for every dollar a company invested. Companies would normally get to a certain share of a market and no bigger – two-fifths was about as good as it got.
About 10 per cent of the world’s public companies create four-fifths of all company profits.13
In the exponential economy, the winner takes all.
Wherever there are network effects, there is the chance of a winner-takes-all market.
Ping An Insurance. To cultivate their digital medicine platform, they hired 1,000 doctors who helped train AI algorithms. As the algorithms got better the service scaled, allowing AI to respond to 75 per cent of the 670,000 consultations each day. A team of 5,000 specialist doctors digitally handles more complex questions.
Google was, however, the first search engine that effectively captured data network effects.
Netflix has followed a similar pattern. In 2010, Netflix had sales of $2.1 billion and 2,100 employees. Each one of them could account for slightly less than $1 million in revenue. A decade later, the firm had grown more than 10 times in size, with revenues approaching $25 billion.
By 2019, it released more original shows and films than the whole TV industry’s yearly output prior to 2016.
Companies that blitzscale emphasise growth over efficiency.
‘competition is for losers’.34
the biggest Exponential Age firms increase their R&D spending faster than their revenues.
Bork’s theory of monopoly also struggles here. His framework accounts for price hikes within a specific sector, but not a wholesale loss of dynamism across an economy.
by 2020 about half of all investment went to companies outside of the United States.
Google bought YouTube in video, DoubleClick in advertising and Android in mobile phones.
Facebook picked up WhatsApp in messaging, Instagram in social media and Oculus in virtual reality.
‘while large teams do indeed advance and develop science, small teams are critical for disrupting it’.
According to The Economist, in the years to 2020, the largest American tech firms paid a tax rate of around 16 per cent of their profits, far below the then 35 per cent corporate US tax rate.
John Maynard Keynes popularised the idea of ‘technological unemployment’ in 1928, when he noted, ‘The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption’ – that is, the ability to find work for workers.4
‘In 1980 it took 25 jobs to generate $1 million in manufacturing output in the US.’ By 2016, it would take just five workers to produce the same value of finished goods.17
A decade later, nearly 70 per cent of shares were traded automatically.23
in late 2019, when more than half of all global assets under management went to simple rules-based funds rather than those run by people making investment decisions.
